Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

I want to do research experiment using artificial pancreas to test glucose. Does the artificial pancreas only works with acid-base reaction? What can I do to test if a certain extract helps control glucose as insulin?
What can I do to experiment controlling glucose to keep it at a certain range rather than pH?
Hope to hear back from you soon.

Hi,

It's a great idea but the 'artificial pancreas' is just a demonstration. You can't use it to do any experiments on regulating glucose levels in a physiological way as your body does using insulin to transport glucose into cells.

This kind of research is mostly done on higher animals which are off-limits for most science fair projects. Likewise, using human subjects is complicated and difficult (although some schools do allow limited use of anonymous data from volunteers).

If there is a university near where you live, especially one that also has a college of medicine, you could check the websites of professors who do medical research and see if there are any working on diabetes. There might be someone willing to take you on in their lab if you can make the commitment in time and effort to do a worthwhile project with them.

Do some more searching online for how other scientists do diabetes research. I'm sure there are model systems that I do not know about and one of those might be doable with the time and resources you have.

Good luck,

Sybee